At 11:12 AM 6/3/2006 +1200, you wrote:
Luxury.
We used to live in a paper bag...
I remember using a 300 bps modem to connect to bulletin boards way back when.
45bps current loop was where I started. Later we built modems, getting to 1200/1200, thru BT's "telepermit" process. Current loop was great fun - it would run for miles - literally, but you had to have what is now called "unbundled local loop" - they used to be know as "pilot cables" in the power industry, and telecom called them A-1 circuits. They were basically dark copper. Telecom actually still do sell them, but only to "special customers". I even used one to demonstrate ADSL back in 96. Using current loop, I used to be able to use BASIC at lunch time. I would load it via paper tape on a teletype that took 45 minutes. Leaving 15 minutes to do something and save it, before having to give the system back. Loading system diagnostics also took an age so sometimes we wrote our own in machine code, just flipping bits in hardware registers and scoping out where the signal died. A lost art now with LSI....... We also used to do sysgen on a machine with 2x 8inch floppies - all of 128kBytes each. sysgen was building the operating system. If we had hard disks, they were the RK05 at 2.5MB each. Later we ran larger systems with 768 KB of core memory with 25 users on the system. I upgraded it to 1.5MB, paying $16K for 768KB. And 450MB disks later cost $42,000 each and required a formal decision of Council.....